John Updike Quotes
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
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'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
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'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
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At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
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His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.
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His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
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Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.